Haiti : careful planning, not speedy reconstruction

Meeting with the Mayor of Port-au-Prince. Jean-Yves Muscadin Jason, the Mayor of Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti laid waste by the earthquake of the 12th January, was invited to Brussels at the end of April by the European Parliament’s Development Committee. He also met the European Commissioner for International Cooperation, Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Response to give his views on the reconstruction process, stressing the importance of planning rather than starting work straight away.*

“I explained to them”, he said to The Courier, “that before talking about reconstruction, you need a construction plan. I have asked for support from the European Parliament for a long-term multidisciplinary development centre for Port-au-Prince and its metropolitan area, as this would encourage both reflection and the production of plans like management, town planning, public security and transport programmes”.

Interview

HG – On 12 January, where were you when everything collapsed under your feet?

J-Y M J – I was hosting an administrative meeting of the city council’s finance department in an administrative building. There was a dull thud, and people ran out. I didn’t know what it was, and I went to get my PDA (Blackberry) from the city council building, and put it in my bag. Then the building collapsed, and I found myself under the rubble, along with a few employees. There were other colleagues who were stuck, and I went to look for help. We managed to get everyone out, but there were several deaths at the run-down town hall, which had fallen down, and about a hundred at the city council, including fifty schoolchildren. The city council runs eight local schools, and all of these collapsed.

Did you yourself realise the extent of the damage straight away?
 
At first, no. It was when I came out that I realised it had been an earthquake. I went straight to speak to our civil protection squad, and then out into the streets to help people. I saw it was a catastrophe. It was terrible. I went to several hospitals to look for doctors who could look after the seriously injured. It was a traumatic experience, and I’m still suffering from it.

Why are the city council’s civil protection units so important?  

The State in Haiti is weak, and it has never wanted the city council to be strong. It’s true that there is a constitutional stipulation for administrative and financial autonomy for councils, but not all city councils have been fully set up yet. I came here in March 2007, and first I had to fight within the framework of decentralised cooperation with foreign organisations to build up the city council. When I arrived, there was an embryonic volunteer organisation which worked directly with the Interior Minister in the area of civil protection. It’s thanks to the twinning programme we’ve started with several Mexican towns that we managed to set up local civil protection units just a few days before the earthquake, with about thirty technical staff who had just been trained.

Is it true that the earthquake has created a kind of positive catharsis? There seems to have been a lot of progress in Haiti in the last few years.

On the first days after the catastrophe, those who were on the streets were citizens and volunteers linked to the city council. We managed to get neighbourhood councils going, and that’s what helped us deal with the disaster. Besides, Haitians are fighters, people who are used to struggling against adversity, and the earthquake has shown our ability to respond. Our experience in Haiti might be helpful to other countries that suffer disaster like this. We got up, came together, and dug into the earth with our fingers, without waiting for the tractors and excavators, and we managed to save quite a lot of lives. It’s also a valuable opportunity to build something new: we have to build and not rebuild, and find our own Haitian solutions. And that can only be done with citizens who are conscious what does that mean?, who have a sense of belonging to something on which we have to work each day to improve and polish, and who must understand that they are the masters of their own future.

Was this all done with the help of the international community?

We have received aid, but the kind of aid that kills. When you receive five planes full of hundreds of bottles of water, those plastic bottles stay in Haiti, and we have to deal with that. How are we going to get Haitians to accept these people who arrive with everything and who are frightened of us, who don’t want to go into the so-called danger zones, what the NGOs call ‘red zones’ ? Now at least there is a local government which can provide reassurance, and take them to those areas where there are problems.

When an NGO arrives with thousands, or millions, of bags of rice and hands them out in a way lacking in all respect, that spoils people and distorts the economy. These bags of rice are subsidised. We have rice in Haiti. Why don’t we subsidise it to give to people? In the medium term, there’s no room on the market for our rice from Artibonite, which is an area that wasn’t hit by the earthquake.

In a few years’ time, our country will start to ask these questions about aid again. We will either still be receiving aid, which will be a disgrace, or we will be looking after ourselves. Either we have partners, or we have backers. Backers impose their own ideas, but partners take the time to talk things over and work with you to find solutions together.

* The EU Development Commissioner Andris Piebalgs visited Haiti later.

Hegel Goutier